Challenge: Formed in 2000 as a joint venture of European plastics companies, Inergy has had to integrate previously separate networks, centralize information services to save costs, and boost network performance to ensure those newly centralized services would function properly.

Baseline Goals:

Boost effective bandwidth by 200%; actually achieved 300%.

Reduce the number of Windows network domains by 90% and the administrative manpower required to administer them by 80%. Actual: 95% and 85%, respectively.

Cease adding to wide-area network bandwidth every six months, saving about $300,000 per year in telecommunications costs for bandwidth upgrades.

Realize a 2.25-year payback on its $2 million network integration project.

David F. Carr is the Technology Editor for Baseline Magazine, a Ziff Davis publication focused on information technology and its management, with an emphasis on measurable, bottom-line results. He wrote two of Baseline's cover stories focused on the role of technology in disaster recovery, one focused on the response to the tsunami in Indonesia and another on the City of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.David has been the author or co-author of many Baseline Case Dissections on corporate technology successes and failures (such as the role of Kmart's inept supply chain implementation in its decline versus Wal-Mart or the successful use of technology to create new market opportunities for office furniture maker Herman Miller). He has also written about the FAA's halting attempts to modernize air traffic control, and in 2003 he traveled to Sierra Leone and Liberia to report on the role of technology in United Nations peacekeeping.David joined Baseline prior to the launch of the magazine in 2001 and helped define popular elements of the magazine such as Gotcha!, which offers cautionary tales about technology pitfalls and how to avoid them.